Los Angeles Magazine
February 1, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
Los Angeles is an actor’s town. Some 40,000 actors call L.A. home. But more than their numbers, it is their hunger, their flair, and most of all their ability to face rejection daily and yet still reinvent themselves that fuel this city and make it unlike any other. Whether character actors or A-listers, newcomers or old-timers, the finest performers — like Patricia Clarkson and Benicio Del Toro — help us see ourselves in ways we never imagined.
Inside: How to survive a terrible audition, how to get Del Toro drunk, and how to turn Clarkson on.
PATRICIA CLARKSON
PATRICIA CLARKSON is telling what turns her on. “Talent is a very potent aphrodisiac,” she says. “When someone is incredibly gifted. I find them incredibly sexy.” The actress takes her time with the word, lingering on the s, letting it build to a hiss, then finishing with a rush of breath. Pier throaty voice, like her laugh, can sometimes be sharp, clipped, Imagine Katharine Hepburn, but born and raised in New Orleans. There are also times, like this afternoon, when her voice — as slow, sweet, and sticky as molasses — can fill a room.
She’s talking about the party scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien, when the three main characters dance and drink together on the beach. She loves this scene, she says, because of its sexual energy. “There’s nothing coy, nothing premeditated, nothing arch. There’s no negligee in the scene. No teddy. It’s about sex,” she says, and this time the word pops like a bottle rocket. “It’s not about tits and ass. There’s no tease. It’s messy It’s a little nasty. And it’s on the edge, though it’s not about doing something taboo just for the sake of being taboo. That drives me crazy you know?”
For years Clarkson was relegated to roles as the wife, the mother, and the girlfriend in films like The Untouchables and Jumanji. The worst thing about this, she says, is that “when you’re playing just these archetypal roles, you’re often not shot from the waist down.” Clarkson believes in the body — its gestures, its frailties, its power to convey.
“I’m a very physical actress. But only with High Art did people get to see me as a physical presence,” she says, referring to her breakthrough performance as Ally Sheedy’s manipulative German girlfriend in the 1998 indie. “Close-ups have their power, but” — here the molasses starts flowing again — “I lo-o-o-ve a big long shot. Set the camera up in the next house over and shoot me.”
Clarkson, who is 44 and known to her friends as Patti, appeared in three films that were released last year (not to mention her regular stint as Aunt Sarah on HBO’s Six Feet Under). In All the Real Girls, she was a professional clown. In Pieces of April, she was a woman in the terminal stages of cancer who reluctantly reconnects with her errant daughter. In The Station Agent, she was a recluse who, while grieving over the death of her son and the end of her marriage, befriends two other lonelyhearts, both of them younger men. “I got to be the chick in that one,” she says. In the coming year, she has four more movies: a horror film (The Woods), an experimental thriller directed by Lars yon Trier (Dogville), a contemporary drama about a Hollywood love triangle (The Dying Gaul), and a movie about Olympic hockey (Miracle). Yes, she acknowledges, she plays wives in two of the four, but wives who are “alive, sparkly, real, detailed.”
Today, though, the actress is thinking about other people’s movies. Asked to choose five favorite scenes, she admits she’s had trouble. There are six videocassettes on the table in front of her and about a dozen more performances she admires — George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, Peter Sellers in The Party, Morgan Freeman in Street Smart — that she’d also like to mention. Sitting in the conference room of the Santa Monica apartment building that is her temporary home, the longtime Manhattan resident twists her red-blond hair into a rope with one hand. “That Stephen King movie, Misery, with Kathy Bates. I could have picked her, too.”
Instead she selected Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set (1957), Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast (2000), and Kelly Macdonald in Gosford Park (2001). The actors have one thing in common: Their stories play out not just on their faces or in their words but in the ways they move their bodies onscreen.
Clarkson is eating a candy cane, breaking off little pieces and wriggling them out of the cellophane casing, while she considers what to watch first. She is dressed in a black V neck and olive cargo pants. She is five feet five and tiny — when she lifts up her sweater to show off a fake tan she acquired for her role in The Dying Gaul, her belly is as flat as a teenager’s. But her face — luminous, expressive, warm — is that of a woman who has lived, and lived well.
“I first saw Gaslight when I was 15,” she says, as Bergman appears on a huge TV in front of her. In the film Bergman plays a young wife whose husband is systematically trying to drive her insane. As she begins to suspect that her spouse is a murderer, her eyes dart back and forth. She seems frozen in place.
“From early on I had a thing about Ingrid Bergman,” Clarkson says. “She walks that beautiful line with emotion. She’s always on the verge, and you’re not really sure which way she’s going to go. There’s this fragility and strength absolutely working together at the same time. I watched this, and I was so frightened for her. I remember thinking, ‘I’m never getting married!’” Clarkson laughs, and it sounds like a Gatling gun in a velvet sack. “See the effect it had? Ingrid Bergman is the reason I’m not married!”
IN DESK SET, Hepburn isn’t married, either. She plays a research librarian who fears that a visiting efficiency expert (Tracy) is angling to replace her with a computer. Clarkson has chosen a scene in which Tracy takes Hepburn to lunch, not in a restaurant but on the roof of their office building. The winter air is freezing, and as they fumble with wax paper-wrapped sandwiches, Tracy peppers Hepburn with arcane questions he expects will prove her inferior to a machine.
“Is this an interview?” Hepburn asks, checking her chignon with an idle hand. “I would have had my hair done or something.” Clarkson smiles. She loves the way Hepburn rubs her gloved hands together, pulling her coat closer as she responds to each of Tracy’s queries.
“There’s something about this one scene. It seems incredibly unrehearsed and unpushed. She seems absolutely at ease. He is at once admiring and wry;” she says. “They just seem really comfortable, really in their bodies and in their space. She’s fighting the cold, chewing her sandwich. She’s just so smart, but it’s an effortless intelligence. That’s very difficult to convey.” She pauses. “Also, I just love the wax paper.”
Next Clarkson picks one of the few movies she likes so much, she has watched it three times: Robert Altman’s murder mystery Gosford Park. The film is packed with celebrated actors, all of them “at the top of their form.” But she has chosen a scene that features Macdonald, the young Scottish actress who plays Maggie Smith’s servant. Macdonald’s unassuming character connects everyone in the film — it is she, for example, who deduces who done it.
“From the moment she enters this film — in the beginning, when she’s standing in the rain, absolutely drenched, continuing to help Maggie Smith, not even wiping away the buckets of water — she takes a character who really has no physicality and makes the role expressive and heartbreaking,” Clarkson says. The scene she remembers best is when Macdonald confronts Clive Owen with her suspicion that he is the killer. As it plays, Clarkson clasps her hands behind her neck, rests her elbows on the table, and concentrates. Owen kisses Macdonald, who places her hand on his chest, keeping it softly clenched, as if holding something back. “I’ve been wanting to do that,” Owen tells her, “since I first laid eyes on you.”
“So sweet,” Clarkson says, almost to herself. “What’s great is she’s playing this kind of dowdy woman, but she’s so good, so lovely in a whole different way, that you believe Owen when he says that. That’s her talent coming through.”
She looks at the videos on the table. “You want to stay in the emotional vein?” she asks, and points to Driving Miss Daisy. “When I first saw this movie, I had to be carried out. There’s something so moving about Tandy. You rarely see older people like that in movies.” Clarkson has chosen a scene late in the film when Miss Daisy has her first brush with senility. Frantic, she comes down the stairs in a pink housecoat, her white hair flying, thinking that she has lost some papers. Morgan Freeman tries to calm her down (“Your mind just took a turn this morning, that’s all,” he says).
“Look at her,” Clarkson says, her voice soft. “She has a kind of translucent paper quality — you can almost see through her. She’s like this ghostly presence.” When Tandy takes Freeman’s hand and delivers the film’s most emotional line, “You are my best friend. No, really, you are,” Clarkson is enthralled but dry-eyed. “She says that line without sentiment. Very simply. She’s almost angry,” Clarkson says. “There are just some moments in this film that startle me.”
Clarkson keeps fiddling with a red beaded bracelet that wraps around her left wrist. It is the only piece of jewelry she ever wears. She calls it “my talisman,” and her pale skin (“I’m the whitest person alive”) flushes a bit when she’s asked its origins (it was a gift from her boyfriend, the actor Campbell Scott). In late December, she and Scott wrapped The Dying Gaul, their first film together, in which he plays a bisexual Hollywood mogul and she plays his wife (a role that was challenging, she says, in part because “I have to wear a white bikini through much of it”).
“I could never play somebody’s lover or wife and hate them offscreen,” she says. “I’m not Little Miss Method, but I’m very organic. And I think the more you know the other actors in a film and feel connected to them, the better scenes are.” So making a movie with Scott must have been a breeze, then? She giggles
now, and it’s heartening to hear that even her giggles are sultry. “Campbell is very talented,” she says.
Which brings her back to sex — or more precisely, Sexy Beast. She has chosen the much-talked-about opening scene in which Winstone appears, roasting in the sun, in nothing but a yellow Speedo. “He makes no apologies for the Speedo, and that was kind of amazing,” Clarkson says, sounding like a woman who’s spent a lot of time in a white bikini. “But beyond that, he just has this thing going. He takes a character you think you kind of know — a thug — but the vulnerability he projects in his tough-guy persona blew me away.” Winstone picks up a cloth that’s been soaking in ice water and places it on his crotch. Clarkson shivers.
She flashes back on the scene in Driving Miss Daisy when Tandy, trying to collect herself, smooths her unruly hair with both palms, almost hugging herself as she does so. “It’s this one little moment of vanity,” Clarkson says, mimicking the motion, relishing it. “She does that, and there is a fragility and power that make it. And that exists in men, too.” She turns back to Winstone, all paunch and bluster, on the TV screen. “It’s surprising. Surprising. And you hope to surprise people.”
BENICIO DEL TORO
BENICIO DEL TORO is in love with a monster. She is dressed like an angel, with a wild, wavy mane that stands up on her head, and as Del Toro leans toward her, his own hair — black streaked with white, just like hers — protrudes like a tangle of snakes from underneath an ARIZONA trucker cap. The actor stares at her pale face, which is marked by the angry stitches that hold it together. “So beautiful,” he says, shaking his head.
“The bride of Frankenstein!” a voice booms from the oversize television. In perfect sync, Del Toro mouths the words. He smiles at the bride, then adds in a gravelly whisper: “Amazing.” Del Toro loves Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played Boris Karloff’s mate in the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. Her wide-eyed zombie — created from spare parts scavenged from the newly dead — appears only in the film’s final minutes, when a bolt of lightning sets her stolen heart beating.
“This scene is all about love at first sight. She comes to life, she falls in love — right there,” Del Toro says, pointing as Lanchester’s eyes alight upon her creator, Dr. Frankenstein, played by Colin Clive. “Then she has to reject the monster” — she pulls her hand away from Karloff, screaming and hissing — “and then realize she’s about to die. And she has to tell that whole story in three minutes. A good actor will take a part, and you can’t see anyone else playing it. This movie, it’s done. When it’s that good, it’s just hers forever.”
Del Toro leans back now, exhaling a cloud from his Marlboro Light. He first saw Bride of Frankenstein when he was seven. That was two years before his mother died of hepatitis, six years before his father, a lawyer, moved the family from Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania and enrolled him in boarding school, 11 years before he decided on an acting career, and 26 years before he won an Academy Award. Still, because of Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein remains one of the movies Del Toro admires most.
“I like when an actor can do the weakness in the strength — a weakness they don’t try to sell,” he says. “A good performance, you forget it’s a movie. It pulls you in. I believe it. More than that, I experience it.”
Del Toro’s breakthrough role came in 1995, when he played Fred Fenster, an erratic and mumbling hood in the thriller The Usual Suspects. Ever since, his portrayals have been risky; eclectic, and invariably masterful. Among them are the painter’s best friend in the 1996 biopic Basquiat, Dr. Gonzo in the 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an upstanding Mexican policeman in the 2000 drama Traffic (for which he took home his Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor), and last year, a born-again ex-con in the riveting triptych 21 Grams.
Del Toro is not here to talk about his own accomplishments, though. Asked to choose five of his favorite movie scenes, he arrives at L’Ermitage, the swank Beverly Hills hotel, with six. His selections are all driven by actresses, most of them unsung. In choosing women, Del Toro is trying not to repeat himself. “I’ve caught myself only talking about the Brandos,” he says. More than femininity; however, it is dignity that distinguishes the performances. Dignity and few words.
Benny is what Del Toro’s friends call him. He is 36, taller than most movie stars (six feet two), and his much-remarked-upon hazel eyes (“I have my mom and dad to thank for that –and for the dark circles under them”) slant slightly upward at the corners, which makes him look like he’s squinting even when he’s not. He’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt he bought during Elton John’s 1984 “Breaking Hearts” tour, no socks, and a pair of brown dress shoes so tired that there’s a hole in one sole. (“The shoes have been around since before Fear and Loathing — since before I got fat,” he confesses, referring to the 45 pounds he gained for the movie.) Del Toro is not fat. He’s solid, though, and apparently the asp-like hair isn’t something he can help. Asked about a huge silver ring on his right hand that looks like the face of a madwoman, he says, “It’s Medusa. It was a gift. Because my hair is like hers.”
Cul-de-Sac, Roman Polanski’s 1966 film about a wounded criminal and his dying partner who take refuge at a beachfront castle, is the first film Del Toro wants to discuss. He’s chosen a scene in which the actress Francoise Dorleac (the older sister of Catherine Deneuve) reprimands a child, grabbing him by the ear until he screams. “The kid is messing with her record collection — maybe that’s why I connect to it,” says Del Toro, a music lover who can tell you precisely what he was listening to during the making of each of his films (Fear and Loathing: Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind. Basquiat: the Jam. Traffic: Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue and Los Lobos’ Kiko. 21 Grams: Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising and Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around).
“This movie was introduced to me by Elisabeth Leustig — she passed away;” Del Toro says of the casting director who put him in 1994′s China Moon. “What Dorleac plays is almost like a bad girl. You could say she is a little bit shallow. But at the same time, she puts herself in it in a way that ain’t shallow. There’s a sexiness to it. She’s edgy; like, ‘You mess with me, I’ll mess with you.’ I’ve seen her in other movies — she’s been my little secret of an actress that I knew that not many people knew.”
Del Toro dumps two sugars into a double espresso and settles in to watch Daisy Granados in Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s 1968 film – -the first from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the United States. The film follows a well-to-do intellectual, Sergio, who has decided to stay in Cuba after his wife and family leave. Granados plays Elena, an aspiring actress who sets her sights on Sergio.
“Why do you want to be an actress?” Sergio asks Elena at one point. “Because I’m tired of always being the same,” she says. “That way I can be someone else without people thinking I’m crazy. I want to unfold my personality.” Sergio’s response: “The only thing an actress does is repeat the same movements and the same words thousands of times.”
Does Del Toro agree with Sergio or Elena? He laughs and says they’re both right. “You could say that actors are a little schizophrenic,” he says. “But all of us are. We all behave in different ways with different people.” Granados’s portrayal veers from a blushing innocent to a vamp. Instead of speaking, she sings many of her lines, borrowing phrases from “one of those bogged-down-in-despair kind of songs that you hear in some bar in the Caribbean,” says Del Toro, who admits that his own Caribbean roots make him especially fond of this film. “She’s like a femme fatale. Her character is all about right now: You have to marry me. Sergio doesn’t want a relationship, and when she smells that, she’s like, I’m going to get you. She’s calculating. She knows exactly what she’s doing. That’s a very hard part to play.”
DEL TORO’S cell phone is buzzing in his pocket. “I’m a busy bee,” he says apologetically, turning it off as Fat City, John Huston’s 1972 film about amateur boxing, appears on the screen. Del Toro has cued it to a scene in which Susan Tyrrell, who received an Oscar nomination for her bittersweet depiction of an aging alcoholic, is approached in a bar by Stacy Keach, a down-and-out fighter. “Mind if I sit down?” Keach asks. “It’s a free country,” says Tyrrell. Her hair is matted, her shoulders are slumped, her polka-dot dress is open in the back where she forgot to zip it. Del Toro says he’s rarely seen a more realistic portrait of a brokenhearted romantic.
“Sometimes when I watch this scene I get drunk. It’s that good. I feel like I’m drunk,” he says, his voice faintly cracking with admiration. He imagines Huston and Keach stepping back and letting Tyrrell take charge. “They set it up for her, and she came in and killed it,” he says, his hands clasped in reverence, an unlit Marlboro hanging from his lips. “Look at her. She’s cute, she’s sexy, she’s pathetic, she’s drunk, she’s crazy, she’s strong. There’s everything in there. And she never comes out of it. It’s raw, what she’s saying. Then, when she’s played every other card, she becomes funny She becomes” — he pauses — “beautiful.”
Zorba the Greek is next. Del Toro respects Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of Zorba enough to be able to quote lines of dialogue verbatim (“Life,” he recites, “is you undo your belt and look for trouble”). But as an actor he has learned even more from Irene Papas’s grieving widow. She barely speaks in the film, relying instead on her swift, upright gait, her expressive dark brows, the dramatic uncoiling of her long hair. He has cued up her final scene, when she is stoned and then stabbed to death by her fellow villagers. Del Toro bites his bottom lip. “Brutal,” he says.
He touches an orange Bic fighter to his sixth cigarette. “She never screams, not until the last moment. Never asks for help, either. She fights to survive, but she sort of knows it’s part of the deal, living in a small Greek old-world town. She accepts her fate, even though she never quits. She knows her own culture: You don’t scream. You take it. You do whatever you can, but you don’t degrade yourself You don’t ask for pity. You don’t lose it. She’s a great example of less is more. But boy is the less loaded.”
In The Usual Suspects, Del Toro convinced director Bryan Singer that his incomprehensible mumble did more to build the Fenster character than the dialogue, which wasn’t essential to the plot. In Traffic, he persuaded Steven Soderbergh to cut some of his lines when he felt a gesture better served the scene. In 21 Grams, Del Toro suggested to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu that his pivotal final scene with Naomi Watts, in which he tries to offer an apology for an act too destructive to imagine, should be done without words. “We shot it once with the lines,” he says. “Then we did it without lines, and Naomi said, ‘That’s the one.’” That take, in which Del Toro’s remorse and Watts’s grief play out in a shared glance, is the one that appears in the film.
The afternoon is almost gone when Del Toro feeds the final film into the VCR: the 1964 mystery Seance on a Wet Afternoon, one of only five movies to feature the revered theater actress Kim Stanley. She plays an unhinged and domineering medium who bullies her husband into kidnapping a little girl so she can win acclaim for helping reunite the child with her family. Stanley got an Oscar nomination for the performance, which climaxes with her holding a seance with a police detective and revealing not only her own guilt but the source of her madness: the death of her infant son.
“She’s the money,” Del Toro says as Stanley awakens from her trance, turns to her beleaguered husband, and asks meekly, “Did I do it right?” “Right there, suddenly she becomes the weak one. She’s been in another place. She tells the cops without knowing she’s telling. It could be over the top, but she doesn’t take it there. It’s bizarre. And great. Just great.”
Does Del Toro realize that what unites the six performances — commitment, self-restraint, and a trust of silence — also defines his own portrayal in 21 Grams? He inhales, considering. “That role would probably be a mixture of Irene Papas and Bride of Frankenstein,” he says, half joking. He reviews the other scenes in his head. “Actually,” he adds, more seriously now, “I guess you could see all these women in there. Susan Tyrrell, certainly. But not as good. Not even close.”
